Part 8

Thus an actual conflict is joined, and it is the height of absurdity for the Millikans and other such compromisers to seek to evade it with soft words. That conflict was not begun by science. It did not start with an invasion of the proper field of theological speculation by scientific raiders. It started with an invasion of the field of science by theological raiders. Now that it is on, it must be pressed vigorously from the scientific side, and without any flabby tenderness for theological susceptibilities. A defensive war is not enough; there must be a forthright onslaught upon the theological citadel, and every effort must be made to knock it down. For so long as it remains a stronghold, there will be no security for sound sense among us, and little for common decency. So long as it may be used as a recruiting-station and rallying-point for the rabble, science will have to submit to incessant forays, and the same forays will be directed against every sort of rational religion. The latter danger is not unobserved by the more enlightened theologians. They are well aware that, facing the Fundamentalists, they must either destroy or be destroyed. It is to be hoped that the men of science will perceive the same plain fact, and so give over their vain effort to stay the enemy with weasel words.

2

_Heretics_

ALTGELD OF ILLINOIS, by Waldo R. Browne, New York: _B. W. Huebsch_. THE LAST OF THE HERETICS, by Algernon Sidney Crapsey. New York: _Alfred A. Knopf_. [The American Mercury, October, 1924.]

When I was a boy, in the early nineties of the last century, the reigning hobgoblin of the United States was John P. Altgeld, Governor of Illinois. From this distance the ill-fame that played about him seems almost fabulous. He was a sort of horrendous combination of Trotsky and Raisuli, Darwin and the German Crown Prince, Jesse James and Oscar Wilde, with overtones of Wayne B. Wheeler and the McNamara brothers. We have had, in these later years, no such communal devil. The La Follette of 1917 was a popular favorite compared to him; the Debs of the same time was a spoiled darling. What I gathered from my elders, in the awful years of adolescence, when my voice began to break and vibrissæ sprouted on my lip, was that Altgeld was a shameless advocate of rapine and assassination, an enemy alike to the Constitution and the Ten Commandments--in short, a bloody and insatiable anarchist. I was thus bred to fear him even more than I feared the anonymous scoundrels who had stolen Charlie Ross. When I dreamed, it was of catching him in some public place and cutting off his head, to the applause of the multitude.

The elders that I have mentioned were mainly business men, with a few _Gelehrte_ thrown in. I learned later on, by hard experience, that the opinions of such gentlemen, particularly of public matters and public men, were not always sound. Nevertheless, I continued to have a bilious suspicion of the Hon. Mr. Altgeld, and it survived even the discovery, made much later, that men who had actually known him--for example, Theodore Dreiser--regarded him very highly. I remember very well how shocked I was when Dreiser made me privy to this fact. It made a dent, I suppose, in my old view, but it surely did not dispose of it altogether. I continued to believe that Altgeld, though perhaps not an anarchist, as alleged, was at least a blathering Socialist, and hence deserving of a few prophylactic kicks in the pantaloons. I was far gone in my forties before ever I got at the truth. Then I found it in this modest book of Mr. Browne’s--a volume that is dreadfully written, but extremely illuminating. That truth may be put very simply. Altgeld was not an anarchist, nor was he a Socialist: he was simply a sentimentalist. His error consisted in taking the college yells of democracy seriously.

I do not go into the evidence, but refer you to the book. It is very completely documented, and it leaves little room for doubt, despite Mr. Browne’s obvious prejudice in favor of some of Altgeld’s more dubious ideas, especially the idea of government ownership. On the main points his argument is quite beyond cavil. Did Altgeld pardon the Chicago anarchists? Then it was simply because they had been railroaded to jail on evidence that should have made the very judge on the bench guffaw--as men are still railroaded in California to-day. Did he protest against Cleveland’s invasion of Chicago with Federal troops at the time of the Pullman strike? Then it was because he knew only too well how little they were needed--and what sinister influences had cajoled poor old Grover into sending them. In brief, Altgeld was one of the first public men in America to protest by word and act against government by usurers and their bashi-bazouks--the first open and avowed advocate of the Bill of Rights since Jackson’s time. A romantic fellow, and a firm believer in the virtues of the common people, he couldn’t rid himself of the delusion that they would follow him here--that after the yell of rage there would come a resounding cheer. That belief gradually degenerated into a hope, but I doubt that it ever disappeared altogether. The common people met it by turning Altgeld out of office, swiftly and ignominiously. After they had got rid of him as Governor of Illinois, they even rejected him as mayor of Chicago. His experience taught him a lesson, but like that of the Aframerican on the gallows, it came too late.

What lesson is in his career for the rest of us? The lesson, it seems to me, that any man who devotes himself to justice and common decency, under democracy, is a very foolish fellow--that the generality of men have no genuine respect for these things, and are always suspicious of the man who upholds them. Their public relations, like their private relations, are marked by the qualities that mark the inferior man at all times and everywhere: cowardice, stupidity and cruelty. They are in favor of whoever is wielding the whip, even when their own hides must bear the blows. How easy it was to turn the morons of the American Legion upon their fellow-slaves! How heroically they voted for Harding, and then for Coolidge after him--and so helped to put down the Reds! Dog eats dog, world without end. In the Pullman strike at least half the labor unions of the United States were against the strikers, as they were against the more recent steel strikers, and helped to beat them. Altgeld battled for the under dog all his life--and the under dog bit him in the end. A pathetic career, but not without its touches of sardonic comedy. Altgeld, in error at bottom, was often also in error on the surface, and not infrequently somewhat grotesquely. He succumbed to the free silver mania. He supported Bryan--nay more, he may be said to have discovered and made Bryan. It is fortunate for him that he was dead and in hell by 1902, and so not forced to contemplate the later states of his handiwork. He was excessively romantic, but certainly no ignoramus. Imagine him listening to one of good Jennings’ harangues against the elements of biology! Such men, indeed, are always happier dead. This world, and especially this Republic, is no place for idealists.

Another proof of it is offered by the career of Dr. Crapsey, whose trial for heresy entertained the damned in 1906. He is still alive as I write, and still full of steam. But I doubt that he is as sure as he used to be that common sense and common honesty pay. Many of the frauds who drove him out of the church, though they knew that he was right, are bishops to-day, and licensed to bind and loose. Others have been called by God, and sit upon His right hand. The church itself, as it has grown more sordid and swinish, has only grown more prosperous. In New York City its income approaches that of the bootleggers and it is almost as well regarded. Every new profiteer, even before he tries to horn into the Piping Rock Club, subscribes to its articles. It is robbing the Church of Christ Scientist of all the rich Jews; they are having their sons baptized in its fonts and christened Llewellyn, Seymour and Murray. Certainly it would be difficult to imagine a more gloriously going concern. The rising spires of its steel and concrete cathedrals begin to bulge the floor of heaven; its clergy are sleek, fat and well-oiled; its bishops come next in precedence after movie stars and members of the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. Lately it threw out another heretic--like Dr. Crapsey, one accused of putting the Sermon on the Mount above the conflicting genealogies of the Preacher. As for Crapsey himself, he has naught to console him in his old age save the thought that hell will at least be warm.

His book is extremely amusing and instructive. Like Altgeld, he confesses to foreign and poisonous blood. The _Stammvater_ of the American Crapseii was a fellow named Kropps, apparently a Hessian. But his great-great grandson, the father of the heretic, married the daughter of a United States Senator, and so there is some amelioration of the horror. Like Altgeld again, Crapsey went to the Civil War as a boy scarcely out of knee breeches. Altgeld was so poor that he gladly took the $100 offered by a patriot who had been drafted and wanted a substitute; Crapsey volunteered. Both succumbed to camp fevers and were discharged. Both then took to Service among the downtrodden, Altgeld in politics and the law, and Crapsey in one of the outlying hereditaments of Trinity parish. Both were safe so long as they appeared to be fraudulent; the moment they began to show genuine belief in their doctrines they found themselves in difficulties. So Altgeld became the favorite hobgoblin of the Republic and Crapsey became its blackest heretic.

3

_The Grove of Academe_

THE GOOSE-STEP, by Upton Sinclair, Pasadena, Calif.: _Published by the Author_. [The Smart Set, May, 1923.]

The doctrine preached in this fat volume--to wit, that the American colleges and universities, with precious few exceptions, are run by stock-jobbers and manned by intellectual prostitutes--this doctrine will certain give no fillip of surprise to steady readers of my critical compositions. I have, in fact, maintained it steadily since the earliest dawn of the present marvelous century, and to the support of it I have brought forward an immense mass of glittering and irrefragable facts and a powerful stream of eloquence. Nor have I engaged in this moral enterprise _a cappella_. A great many other practitioners have devoted themselves to it with equal assiduity, including not a few reformed and conscience-stricken professors, and the net result of that united effort is that the old assumption of the pedagogue’s _bona fides_ is now in decay throughout the Republic. In whole departments of human knowledge he has become suspect, as it were, _ex officio_. I nominate, for example, the departments of history and of what is commonly called English language and literature. If a professor in the first field shows ordinary honesty, or, in the second field, ordinary sense, it is now regarded as a sort of marvel, and with sound reason. Barring a scant dozen extraordinary men, no American professor of history has written anything worth reading since the year 1917; nearly all the genuine history published in the United States since then has come from laymen, or from professors who have ceased to profess. And so in the domain of the national letters. The professors, with a few exceptions, mainly belated rice-converts, are unanimously and furiously consecrated to vain attacks upon the literature that is in being. Either, like the paleozoic Beers, of Yale, they refuse to read it and deny that it exists, or, like the patriotic Matthews, of Columbia, they seek to put it down by launching Ku Klux anathemas against it. The net result is that the professorial caste, as a whole, loses all its old dignity and influence. In universities large and small, East, West, North and South, the very sophomores rise in rebellion against the incompetence and imbecility of their preceptors, and in the newspapers the professor slides down gradually to the level of a chiropractor, a press-agent or a Congressman.

Thus there is nothing novel in the thesis of Dr. Sinclair’s book, which deals, in brief, with the internal organization of the American universities, and their abject subjection to the Money Power, which is to say, to Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club concepts of truth, liberty and honor. But there is something new, and very refreshing, in the manner of it, for the learned author, for the first time, manages to tell a long and dramatic story without intruding his private grievances into it. Sinclair’s worst weakness, next to his vociferous appetite for Remedies that never cure, is his naïve and almost actorial vanity. As everyone knows, it botched “The Brass Check.” So much of that book was given over to a humorless account of his own combats with yellow journals--which, in the main, did nothing worse to him than laugh at him when he was foolish--that he left untold a great deal that might have been said, and with perfect justice and accuracy, about the venality and swinishness of American newspapers. In “The Profits of Religion” he wobbled almost as badly; the subject, no doubt, was much too vast for a single volume; the Methodists and Baptists alone, to say nothing of Holy Church, deserved a whole shelf. But in “The Goose-Step” he tells a straightforward story in a straightforward manner--simply, good-humoredly and convincingly. When he comes into the narrative himself, which is not often, he leaves off his customary martyr’s chemise. There is no complaining, no pathos, no mouthing of platitude; it is a plain record of plain facts, with names and dates--a plain record of truly appalling cowardice, disingenuousness, abjectness, and degradation. Out of it two brilliant figures emerge: first the typical American university president, a jenkins to wealth, an ignominious waiter in antechambers and puller of wires, a politician, a fraud and a cad; and secondly, the typical American professor, a puerile and pitiable slave.

Such are the common and customary bearers of the torch in the Republic. Such is the usual machinery and inner nature of the higher learning among us. Its aim, briefly stated, is almost indistinguishable from the aim of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, and Kiwanis. The thing it combats most ardently is not ignorance, but free inquiry; it is devoted to forcing the whole youth of the land into one rigid mold. Its ideal product is a young man who is absolutely correct in all his ideas--a perfect reader for the _Literary Digest_, the _American Magazine_, and the editorial page of the New York _Times_. To achieve this end Big Business has endowed it with unprecedented liberality; there are single American universities with more invested wealth and more income than all the universities of Germany, France or England taken together. But in order to get that ocean of money, and to pay for the piles of pseudo-Gothic that now arise all over the land, scholarship in America has had to sacrifice free inquiry to the prejudices and private interests of its masters--the search for the truth has had to be subordinated to the safeguarding of railway bonds and electric light stocks. As Sinclair shows, there is scarcely a university in the United States, whether maintained out of the public funds or privately endowed, that is not run absolutely, in all departments, by precisely the same men who run the street railways, the banks, the rolling-mills, the coal mines and the factories of the country--in brief, by men who have no more respect for scholarship than an ice-wagon driver has for beautiful letters. There is scarcely an American university or college in which the scholars who constitute it have any effective control over its general policies and enterprises, or even over the conduct of their own departments. In almost every one there is some unspeakable stockbroker, or bank director, or railway looter who, if the spirit moved him, would be perfectly free to hound a Huxley, a Karl Ludwig or a Jowett from the faculty, and even to prevent him getting a seemly berth elsewhere. It is not only possible; it has been done, and not once, but scores and hundreds of times.

Sinclair is content to set forth the basic facts; his book, as it is, is very long; he neglects laboring all of the deductions and implications that flow from his thesis, some of them obvious enough. One of them is this: that the control of the universities by Mr. Babbitt is making it increasingly difficult to induce intelligent and self-respecting young men to embrace the birchman’s career, and that the personnel of the teaching staffs thus tends to decline in competence, steadily and sharply. This accounts, in large measure, for the collapse of the old public influence of the scholar in America; he begins to be derided simply because he is no longer the dignified man that he once was. In certain departments, of no immediate interest to trustees and contributors, a certain show of freedom, of course, still prevails. What is taught in astronomy, or paleontology, or Greek cannot menace the nail manufacturer on the board, and so he does not issue any orders about it, nor does his agent, the university president. But what is taught in economics, or modern history, or “education,” or sociology, or even literature, involves a dealing with ideas that are apt to hit him where he lives, and so he keeps a wary eye upon those departments, and at the slightest show of heresy he takes measures to protect himself. It is in these regions, consequently, that conformity is most comfortable, and that professional character is most lamentably in decay. Even here, to be sure, a few stout-hearted survivors of an earlier day hold out, but they are surely not many, and they will have no successors. The professor of to-morrow, in all departments that have to do with life as men are now living it in the world, will either be a scholastic goose-stepper or he will be out of a job. The screws are tightening every year. In the past the Babbitts have contented themselves with farming out the management of their intellectual brothels to extra-plaint professors, but now they begin to turn to yet more reliable men: army officers, lame-duck politicians, and engineers. The time will come, no doubt, when the president of Columbia will be just as frankly a partner in J. P. Morgan & Company as the head of the Red Cross or the chief vestryman of Trinity Church.

How far will this debauching of education go? Will the universities sink eventually to the level of the public-schools of such barbarous States as Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi? Here education has been reduced to a bald device for multiplying Shriners, Knights of Pythias and Rotarians--in brief, ignoramuses. In the institutions of higher learning one may reasonably look for some resistance to the process, soon or late. I doubt, however, that it will come from the professors; they are already too much cowed and demoralized, as Sinclair shows abundantly. The American Association of University Professors, an organization formed to protect pedagogues against wanton attack by the Babbitts, numbers but 5000 members; the remaining 195,000 American professors are either afraid to join, or already too much battered to want to. How far their degradation has gone was made visible during the late war, when all save an infinitesimal minority of them yielded to the most extravagant manias of the time and thousands gave astounding exhibitions of moronic sadism. The Neandertal qualities thus awakened are still visible in many directions; in the Southern States, I am informed by an exceptional professor, fully five-sixths of his colleagues became charter members of the Ku Klux Klan. It is hopeless to look for a _Freiheitskrieg_ among such poor serfs. But the students remain, and in them lies some promise for the future. The American university student, in the past, has been a victim of the same process of leveling that destroyed his teacher. He has been taught conformity, obedience, the social and intellectual goose-step; the ideal held before him has been the ideal of correctness. But that ideal, it must be plain, is not natural to youth. Youth is aspiring, rebellious, inquisitive, iconoclastic, a bit romantic. All over the country the fact is bursting through the chains of repression. In scores of far-flung colleges the students have begun to challenge their professors, often very harshly. After a while, they may begin to challenge the masters of their professors. Not all of them will do it, and not most of them. But it doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

4

_The Schoolma’m’s Goal_

THE SOCIAL OBJECTIVES OF SCHOOL ENGLISH, by Charles S. Pendleton. Nashville, Tenn.: _Published by the Author_. [The American Mercury, March, 1925.]

Here, in the form of a large flat book, eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches tall, is a sight-seeing bus touring the slums of pedagogy. The author, Dr. Pendleton, professes the teaching of English (not English, remember, but the teaching of English) at the George Peabody College for Teachers, an eminent seminary at Nashville, in the Baptist Holy Land, and his object in the investigation he describes was, in brief, to find out what the teachers who teach English hope to accomplish by teaching it. In other words, what, precisely, is the improvement that they propose to achieve in the pupils exposed to their art and mystery? Do they believe that the aim of teaching English is to increase the exact and beautiful use of the language? Or that it is to inculcate and augment patriotism? Or that it is to diminish sorrow in the home? Or that it has some other end, cultural, economic or military?

In order to find out, Prof. Pendleton, with true pedagogical diligence, proceeded to list all the reasons for teaching English that he could find. Some he got by cross-examining teachers. Others came from educators of a higher degree and puissance. Yet others he dug out of the text-books of pedagogy in common use, and the dreadful professional journals ordinarily read by teachers. Finally, he threw in some from miscellaneous sources, including his own inner consciousness. In all, he accumulated 1581 such reasons, or, as he calls them, objectives, and then he sat down and laboriously copied them upon 1581 very thin 3×5 cards, one to a card. Some of these cards were buff in color, some were blue, some were yellow, some were pink, and some were green. On the blue cards he copied all the objectives relating to the employment of English in conversation, on the yellow cards all those dealing with its use in literary composition, on the green cards all those having to do with speech-making, and so on. Then he shook up the cards, summoned eighty professional teachers of English, and asked them to sort out the objectives in the order of appositeness and merit. The results of this laborious sorting he now sets before the learned.

Don’t be impatient! I won’t keep you waiting. Here is the objective that got the most votes--the champion of the whole 1581:

The ability to spell correctly without hesitation all the ordinary words of one’s writing vocabulary.

Here is the runner-up:

The ability to speak, in conversation, in complete sentences, not in broken phrases.

And here is No. 7:

The ability to capitalize speedily and accurately in one’s writing.

And here is No. 9:

The ability to think quickly in an emergency.

And here are some more, all within the first hundred:

The ability to refrain from marking or marring in any way a borrowed book.

An attitude of democracy rather than snobbishness within a conversation.

Familiarity with the essential stories and persons of the Bible.